Sevrin shrugs. “They’ll also be princes of the Hollowborn. And we do not allow cruelty.”
“Hollowborns don’tallowcruelty?” Lucien repeats with a huff.
Sevrin cocks his head. “Have you ever heard it rumored that we torture your people in battle? Take prisoners? Target your women and children?”
There’s a painful silence for a really long moment before Lucien says, “No, but–”
“But your people have done all of those things to our people.”
“Yes, but–”
“Calling us cruel is easy, because it’s a label that scares people, but there’s no evidence to back that up. Yes, we’ve been at war with you. We kill your kind, but we’re not needlessly evil.”
The implication being that we are. The three princes don’t look offended though, they look troubled, and I don’t blame them. I don’t know a ton about the wars between my people and the Hollowborns, but I’d never imagined we were the ones to be doing dark things.
“What’s more,” Sevrin begins, “my people have never been the ones to end the treaties between our people.”
“Bullshit,” Lucien says, and now he’s mad.
Sevrin gives him a look. “How did the last treaty end?”
He opens his mouth, closes it, and looks at Alaric.
Alaric speaks. “No one really knows. The information about the treaties, and those times in history, aren’t widely talked about.”
“Why not? I’m certain you guys have been taught every detail about every battle we’ve fought with you, so why haven’t you been taught about the times of peace?”
Alaric and Lucien look at Gareth. The dark-haired man straightens. “It wasn’t necessary for our training.”
“Well,” Sevrin stretches out the word, “let me tell you about someunnecessaryhistory. Your rider, Rowena Thalor, and her dragon, Morrath, brought about the last time of peace between the Hollowborns and the Dravari. She came to the conclusion that we weren’t all that different from each other and that the war between us was pointless. Our king, Varyn Ossaleon, worked out a peace agreement, much like the one we made, that allowed the Hollowborn to use some of your lands in exchange for some of our resources. We built up a small town on the coast that began to thrive. Once we built our town and worked the lands, your people came in and killed everyone living there and gave the town and lands to their own people.”
Alaric bristles. “I’m sure your people did something to instigate–”
“No.” Sevrin looks even more frightening with his bone painting. “We did not break the peace treaty. Rowena Thalor fought with her own king about what he’d done and actively spoke up against how wrong it was. Our people continued working with her in the shadows until she died ‘unexpectedly.’ If the story is to be believed, her dragon then went crazy and attacked the Dravari, so they had to kill him.”
“That’s impossible,” Lucien says. “We would never kill a dragon.”
“And yet, you did.”
“I don’t believe any of this,” Gareth says, scoffing and taking a drink.
“Ask your father to see your history books. You may be surprised how much different our history is than you think.” Sevrin looks at me, and I give him a small smile. “But onto the game.”
“I’ll go next,” Alaric says, but he sounds uncertain. “This isn’t as grand a story as the rest of you have, but my father threw me a birthday party when I turned five where I got a fine sword, which made me push myself even harder. I trained all day afterwards in the pouring rain, then got so sick I nearly died. Every day I dragged myself to training until I collapsed, which angered my father because he felt I was being weak. The healer had to tell my father that if he forced me to keep training, I would die. That was the longest amount of time I got to rest in my life.”
Again, Sevrin looks troubled. “I hope that it’s that your father was angered.”
I stare. “It was that he threw you a birthday party, wasn’t it?”
Gareth finally laughs. “I remember that. My dad called him ‘the weakling’ for like five years after that.”
Lucien grins. “Remember how he got an actor to pretend to be Alaric, collapsing out in the training yard? The actor was weeping and falling and sagging on people at the ball.”
“Your father did that?” I ask, shocked, even though I probably shouldn’t be.
Alaric shrugs. “It was his sense of humor.”
“I don’t find that funny at all,” Sevrin says sternly.
